If MSI’s GT72 isn’t quite powerful enough for you, check out the GT80, which features two GTX 980’s in SLI attached to a huge 18.4-inch screen.

The crazy GX700VO water-cooled laptop from Asus will feature the GTX 980 as an option.

The dock houses all of the Asus’s watercooling tech.

The Aorus X7 is one of the slimest

Clevo has two GTX 980 notebooks on the way, starting with this, the P870DM.

Clevo’s second GTX 980 notebook is the P775DM.

In what is one of the most Goldblum-like moments of the year so far, Nvidia has partnered with OEMs like Asus and MSI to cram the full desktop version of its high-end GTX 980 graphics card into laptops. Thanks to its full array of 2048 CUDA cores, up to 8GB of 7GHz GDDR5 memory, and 1126MHz core clock, Nvidia claims the new laptop GTX 980 offers around a 30 percent performance boost over its previous flagship laptop GPU, the GTX 980M.

Even crazier, Nvidia has also managed to convince OEMs to let users overclock the GTX 980 too. Coupled with Intel’s upcoming unlocked K-series Skylake laptop CPUs, users will be able to eke out a significant amount of extra performance from their laptops, cooling permitting. To help things along, Nvidia’s laptop GTX 980s will differ slightly from their desktop counterparts in that they’ll be binned for improved leakage and power consumption.

Nvidia says the binning process will ensure each laptop GTX 980 is guaranteed to hit the advertised 1126MHz GPU core clock and 1216MHz boost clock, as well as achieve overclocks somewhere in the region of 200MHz. That’s a modest increase over the stock clock, but given the thermal restraints of a notebook chassis it’s still rather impressive. To hit those overclocked speeds, users will be able to tweak the fan curve of the GPU (a first for laptops), as well as adjust the core clock and memory speeds.

However, users will be limited to a fan speed offset set by the notebook manufacturer. The overall power target as well as voltage control will also continue to be locked down. Other features of the laptop GTX 980 include between four- and eight-phase power supplies for better, cleaner power delivery, as well as support for three-panel surround gaming. Some OEMs are equipping their notebooks with three discrete outputs, although others will work via DisplayPort daisy chaining.

Naturally, cramming a 165W GPU into a laptop chassis does come with some compromises. For starters, all the notebooks available at launch feature a 17-inch or larger screen, which—when coupled with the gargantuan external power supplies they require—mean that they’re not exactly something you want to carry around with you too often. All the launch models also only come with 1080p displays, albeit displays that support Nvidia’s variable refresh rate technology G-Sync.

That’s disappointing given the sheer graphics grunt of the GTX 980, which is more than capable of pushing 1440p or 4K visuals at high settings. That said, Asus has teased that some of its upcoming 17-inch gaming notebooks will feature a 4K option. The company’s madcap watercooled GX700VO—which is just as big and outrageous in-person as you’d imagine—will feature a GTX 980 when it launches sometime in November. The rest of the laptop line-up, including a table-burning 18.4-inch SLI model from MSI, will launch later this month. Pricing is to be confirmed, but expect it to be very high indeed (probably £2,000 or more).

While the practicality of putting a GTX 980 into a notebook is questionable, that Nvidia convinced OEMs to designs notebooks with better cooling and power in order to make it happen is impressive—getting them to allow for overclocking, even more so. Nvidia’s senior product manager for GeForce notebooks Brian Choi told Ars that overclocking in particular has been “difficult for [Nvidia] to encourage OEMs to do.”

“When we develop a desktop GPU part we control the GPU temperature, we control the fan, we control everything, and we can expose that to the overclocker very easily,” continued Choi. “In a notebook environment, OEMs like Asus and MSI are responsible for the safety and reliability and longevity of the entire system. So they don’t really want to give away control of cooling, because that can affect the warranty, and stability of their brand.”

As for whether anyone actually wants a desktop GPU in their laptop, along with all the compromises in size, battery life, and noise that brings, Choi was optimistic.

Further Reading

No, it’s not cheap, but the 980 Ti is still an outstanding graphics card for the price.

“We’re not going for the mainstream guy who’s looking for something thin and light with a desktop-class CPU and GPU. God knows I would love to do that one day, I think we all do. But physics is physics, and the fact that we’re able to get a great flagship GTX 980 into a notebook is a real milestone,” said Choi.

“The industry has sort of been kept in a time loop, because no one pushed [OEMs]. I consider it similar to the three-minute mile. No one thought you could break the three-minute mile, but as soon as someone did everyone was piling in. No one thought you could make a thin gaming-class notebook until Razr did it. After Razr did it, everyone figured out it wasn’t that hard and started piling in. In this case, we’re telling the industry to try harder, to make a desktop-class enthusiast notebook and to not be shy about it because people want this.”